- Subject: [WW] Pentagon gave orders for war crimes
- From: "WW" <ww@wwpublish.com>
- Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 19:19:14 -0500
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 13, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
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KOREA 1950, KOSOVO 1999:
PENTAGON GAVE ORDERS FOR WAR CRIMES
By John Catalinotto
What do the U.S. war against Korea in 1950 and the U.S.-
NATO war against Yugoslavia in 1999 have in common? In both
cases the Pentagon gave orders to its pilots to attack
civilian targets.
This fall, after nearly half a century of silence, the
media reported on a massacre by U.S. soldiers of hundreds of
civilians huddled under a bridge at No Gun Ri during the
Korean War. Now Associated Press reporters investigating
that massacre have found more evidence of atrocities in
recently declassified Pentagon documents about the 1950-1951
air war. The AP broke the news on Dec. 28.
They interviewed Korean civilians who had been attacked as
well as U.S. pilots who did the attacking. Even in after-
mission reports at that time, pilots said they had been
ordered to strafe a group of Koreans who "could have been
refugees."
In early August 1950, some six weeks after the war began,
pilots were aware of the problem. "Pilots have difficulty in
determining whether personnel in enemy-held territory are
noncombatants or not," read one report from the U.S. 35th
Fighter-Bomber Squadron. "Leaflets should be dropped on them
warning them to keep out of sight or that they will be
strafed."
This was no surface problem. The truth was that U.S.
ground forces were in rapid retreat at that point in the
war, and many of the Korean fighters described as "North
Koreans" were guerrilla fighters completely at home with the
local population. Just as in Vietnam, the U.S. troops could
not separate the Korean "enemy" from the people because the
vast majority of the people were against the U.S. invaders.
So the orders from the Pentagon brass were to open fire on
the people.
According to the AP report, "Documents found in
declassified military archives show that some troops were
ordered to shoot approaching civilians - orders that
military law experts say were illegal." The Pentagon
considered anyone dressed in white outfits a legitimate
target.
In January 1951, according to south Korean witnesses, U.S.
bombing and strafing killed about 300 south Korean civilian
refugees hiding in a cave some 90 miles south of Seoul, in
Youngchoon.
"The area outside the cave was busy with people coming and
going, villagers said. An observer plane circled and then
four planes dropped incendiary bombs near the cave's
entrance, setting fire to household goods just inside, they
said. Most victims suffocated from smoke.
"Earlier that week, 60 miles to the west, another 300
South Korean refugees were killed by a U.S. air attack as
they jammed a storage house at the village of Doon-po, said
survivor Kim In-tae. Kim, now a Presbyterian minister, said
the planes bombed the location after the refugees set a fire
outside to keep warm. `I woke up from the piles of corpses
after three days,' Kim said."
These and other U.S. massacres of Korean civilians in the
1950-1951 period described in the AP report are war crimes
under the international accords guiding the conduct of war
signed by the U.S.
The generals and politicians who ordered the attacks, as
well as the pilots, are war criminals, whether or not the
Pentagon admits it.
YUGOSLAVIA WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL
The Pentagon is worried its troops might face such
charges--not only over Korea, but in connection with the
many U.S. military interventions of the last 50 years. So in
April 1998 the generals rounded up 100 foreign-service
officials and told them that Washington should refuse to
support any permanent international war crimes tribunal.
Strangely enough, the U.S. government had proposed such a
tribunal in the first place.
The brass wanted no part of any tribunal that could
possibly put U.S. officers or soldiers on trial. They went
along with the special UN War Crimes Tribunal on Yugoslavia
only because it was limited to investigating alleged crimes
committed by Yugoslavs.
This tribunal owes its existence to the U.S. and the other
NATO powers. It was created in 1993 to discredit the
political leadership in Yugoslavia and prepare public
opinion for war. It indicted top leaders of the Yugoslav
government even as NATO bombs were raining on Pristina,
Belgrade and Novi Sad last May.
Yet even this tool of NATO, under pressure from growing
public hostility to that ugly war, is trying to look less
like a Star Chamber.
On Dec. 28, the chief prosecutor for the special War
Crimes Tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, announced she would review
a report on the conduct of NATO pilots and their commanders
during last spring's 78-day bombing campaign against
Yugoslavia.
Del Ponte has made it clear no charges will be brought
against NATO troops as a result of the report. But even
raising such a possibility shakes things up. As one news
report said, "Never has a Western leader or military figure
been hauled before an international tribunal."
MOVEMENT FOR A PEOPLE'S TRIBUNAL
Some of the pressure on Del Ponte comes from a movement
for a "people's tribunal" to try U.S.-NATO war criminals.
This movement has been growing since the International
Action Center held the first hearing last July in New York
before 700 people.
Since then, similar hearings have taken place in 10 U.S.
cities and in Rome, Berlin, Paris, Oslo, Vienna, Novi Sad,
Sydney and Tokyo. The most dramatic was a Nov. 8 tribunal in
Athens before 10,000 people.
In conjunction with these grassroots efforts, members of
the Russian Duma and Canadian attorneys have attempted to
bring some of the evidence of NATO's crimes before the UN
War Crimes Tribunal, demanding they be investigated.
Some truthful accounts of events surrounding the war have
finally made it into the corporate media. They essentially
show that the U.S. provoked the war, that it used a Big Lie
to justify what was really aggression, and that NATO
purposely targeted civilians.
One, by Robert Fisk in The Independent, a British daily,
on Nov. 26, admitted that U.S. and other NATO forces
provoked the war by setting terms at Rambouillet in March
1999 that the Yugoslavs could never accept.
The cries of "genocide" NATO politicians used to justify
the intervention had no basis in fact. U.S. officials said
first that 500,000 Kosovo Albanians had been killed, then
100,000, then 40,000. Yet a United Nations team
investigating so-called "mass graves" found 2,108 bodies--
and these were of all nationalities and had died from all
causes. (Toronto Star, Nov. 4; New York Times, Nov. 10.)
U.S. Air Force generals Wesley Clark and Michael Short
argued over which targets should get priority, wrote Dana
Priest in the Washington Post on Sept. 19, 20 and 21. Clark
wanted to hit military targets in Kosovo and civilian
targets in all of Yugoslavia. Short wanted all bombs and
rockets directed at civilian targets. But both these U.S.
generals directing NATO bombing purposely struck civilian
economic targets to bring pressure on the Belgrade
government to capitulate.
- END -
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